THREATS AND RESPONSES: NEWS ANALYSIS

By JIM DWYER

Published: September 11, 2002

Of course the country had to understand what went wrong. One of the largest structures ever built had failed, at a terrible cost in lives. When warned of danger, those in charge had shrugged. Many died because the rescue effort was plagued by communication breakdowns, a lack of coordination, failure to prepare.

These findings on the sinking of the Titanic entered the public record after the Carpathia docked at the Chelsea piers in Manhattan on April 18, 1912, with the 705 survivors plucked from the North Atlantic. Starting the next morning at the Waldorf-Astoria, the barely dry witnesses provided a rich body of facts about the accident, the Titanic, and maritime practices to the United States Senate Commerce Committee, which held 18 days of hearings. Their testimony gave form to a distant horror, shaping law and history.

No inquiry remotely similar in scope, energy or transparency has examined the attacks of last Sept. 11, the devastating collapse of two of the world's tallest structures, the deaths at the Pentagon or on United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. A handful of tightly focused reviews have taken place mostly in secret, conducted by private consultants, or by Congressional committees.

One year later, the public knows less about the circumstances of 2,801 deaths at the foot of Manhattan in broad daylight than people in 1912 knew within weeks about the Titanic, which sank in the middle of an ocean in the dead of night.

That hardly seems possible, considering that 9/11 iconography has been absorbed into everything from football pageants to pitches by speakers peddling lessons in leadership. And yet, says John F. Timoney, once a senior police commander in New York and the former police commissioner in Philadelphia, the events of Sept. 11 are among the most rare in American public life: true catastrophes that have gone fundamentally unscrutinized.

''You can hardly point to a cataclysmic event in our history, whether it was the sinking of the Titanic, the Pearl Harbor attack, the Kennedy assassination, when a blue-ribbon panel did not set out to establish the facts and, where appropriate, suggest reforms,'' Mr. Timoney said. ''That has not happened here.''

In Washington, a special joint Congressional committee met a dozen times in secret to investigate the performance of the intelligence services, but planned public hearings have been postponed.

In New York, which suffered the greatest loss of life in the attacks, no formal review of the emergency response was opened until January, when Michael R. Bloomberg succeeded Rudolph W. Giuliani as mayor. And even then, the city proceeded with maximum circumspection. The new administration commissioned McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm, to assess the Police and Fire Departments separately. Mr. Bloomberg pointedly said that the two reports ''should not be described as investigations; they have not attempted moment-by-moment re-creations of the events of 9/11.'' The purpose, he said, was only to identify ''specific and important opportunities'' for improvement.

Nor has there been a wide public demand for answers, to the frustration of a handful of victims' families.

Why this national reluctance to face the country's bloodiest modern disaster in all its dimensions?

The familiar narrative and images of heroism surely offer comfort and pride. Any wide-ranging study is bound to find unflattering profiles of self-inflicted wounds, poor preparation, even a kind of mass stupor in the face of rising threats. Islamic fundamentalists had, after all, been killing Americans and attacking American symbols for a decade, in New York, in Saudi Arabia, in Africa, in Yemen. They tried to knock over the twin towers in 1993, and were caught plotting to crash hijacked airplanes into landmarks in 1994 and 1995.

Legislators who examine even lame and flimsy intelligence operations run the risk of seeming to make matters worse by opening up methods to scrutiny by enemies. Now the F.B.I. is investigating Congressional staff members and senators to see if they were the source of news reports that said the National Security Agency had bobbled hints of a pending attack.

In New York, different questions have undermined searching inquiries into the emergency response.

The adequacy of the building code for skyscrapers, while a technical issue, is by definition a matter of life and death. Also by definition, it is a question of costs for the real estate industry. A joint government-industry task force is now studying the New York codes, separate from the emergency responses. After the 1993 trade center bombing, a similar group made almost no changes because of resistance from the building industry, said Alan Reiss, who was the director of the trade center until last summer. By shaping basic structural requirements, the codes resonate on issues as basic to survival as the number of lifeboats a ship like the Titanic must carry: these laws effectively determine how rescue workers attack fires, whether people can escape from elevators and how many stairways are necessary.

At least 1,100 people survived the initial impacts from the planes, but were trapped. How many might have been saved if the buildings had stood longer? The city has not explored that question.